


cloak & dagger

by theredhoodie



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate S2, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Angst, Angst and Feels, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Inhumans AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 22:39:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11678541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theredhoodie/pseuds/theredhoodie
Summary: When the Terrigen Crystals were broken, not only did Skye cocoon and wake up with powers, but so did Jemma and Fitz. With powers that are the positive and negative of each other, they become even more inseparable than before. A year later and on the run from SHIELD and Inhuman hate groups, the two scientists have to find a way to control their ever increasing powers so that they can one day rejoin their friends at SHIELD.





	cloak & dagger

**Author's Note:**

> So this is based loosely on a dream of mine! I meant to have it be much darker, but I couldn't do that to my lil sweet beans. I hope you enjoy!

Jemma lowered her eyes to the microscope ocular and twisted the knob at the side. Highly magnified blood cells swam across the focused lens. They appeared normal at first glance, but Jemma  _knew_  there had to be something there. Her makeshift lab didn't have the equipment to map DNA, and a year of blood and tissue samples was getting her nowhere.

And yet she kept doing it, because it was the only thing she had to focus on. Besides Fitz, science was her true love and she knew that it would help her through this transition period.

A transition period that she was beginning to think was turning permanent. She couldn't live like this forever.

Reaching forward, Jemma turned up the ultraviolet light pointing at the blood sample. She squinted as the light refracted up the eyepiece and momentarily made her see spots. Turning it down again, she noticed the blood cells had darkened a shade and were moving more quickly, agitatedly.

"Results? The same as yesterday," she said aloud, stepping away from the microscope and reaching for the notebook on the table next to her. Yes, she, Jemma Simmons, was forced to record scientific research by hand on paper. No fancy tablets connected to SHIELD servers for her. She lifted the pen to the paper and wrote out her findings in neat script.

There was an endless row of data without change, but she tried her best not to worry about it. If she did then all of this would be for nothing.

Grabbing the sample in her gloved hands, Jemma deposited it in the safety hazard box sitting next to the metal table. Her hands trembled as she turned around and stripped the gloves off, tucking one into the other and tossing them too. Letting out a shaky breath, she ran her hands over her hair, smoothed back into a ponytail. She tugged at the band and let her hair fall down to her shoulders. She hadn't had a proper trim in ages. It was starting to resemble her slightly frizzy and mousey hair she had when she first entered SHIELD Academy. That was a lifetime ago.

Scraping her short nails over her scalp, she leaned back against the table and closed her eyes. Darkness curled around her thoughts, cold and hungry. It was so easy to just let it consume her, to push her way toward the edge, a cold and hard exhilaration taking over her, unlike anything she'd ever felt before.

The door to the apartment banged open loudly. Jemma's eyes flew open.

"Damn," Fitz hissed, juggling bags and keys and nudging the door shut a little softer with the toe of his shoe. It clicked shut and he turned around, his eyes falling on Jemma in her makeshift lab in the middle of their apartment. "You all right?"

She nodded curtly, her hands curling around the edge of the metal table for a moment, the pain centering her. "Yeah, of course," she said offhandedly, pushing away from the table.

"I've got some groceries," he said, placing the bags on the worn, secondhand kitchen table with the gouge in the middle and the permanent marker stains along one edge.

"That's great." She walked up silently and slid her hand around the back of his neck, coaxing his attention toward her rather than domestic tasks. He turned at her touch and she kissed him, hard and needy, pressing her body to his and snaking her free arm around his back, hanging on dearly with blunt nails.

He responded distractedly, though he held onto her loosely before pulling back. "Wait, Jem—" She kissed him again, smothering his words for a few seconds before letting him continue. "I've got milk. I uh…I've got to put the milk in the fridge."

She felt a tiny piece inside of her warm up. He was still the same old Fitz, even through all of this. She let him go, melting into one of the mismatched kitchen seats and watching as he emptied the bags into their two food cabinets and the metal fridge that would have shorted out a long time ago if Fitz wasn't a genius.

"Are you  _sure_  you're all right?" he asked again, closing the fridge, the milk safely inside. "Not that I  _mind_  the kissing and other things, but you usually only get so…"

"Intense. I know. I'm sorry." Jemma clasped her hands together tightly and bit down on the inside of her cheek.

"No." His head popped out from behind the cabinet door. "Don't—you don't need to apologize. It's just an observation."

She stood up, willing her legs to work as she did so and moved closer to him. "I was apologizing less for the sexual affairs and more for just the general…darkness that I am."

Fitz turned around, his eyes instantly softening once they settled on her face. "You don't need to apologize for that either."

Jemma nodded. It wasn't the first time that he told her that. As a scientist, she should be thrilled to have gone through Terragenesis. She had personal experience with the alien transformation, and yet the results had not turned out as planned. Her life was in an upheaval, and the only constant was Fitz.

She reached out a hand and laid it against his chest, over his heart. "Are  _you_  feeling all right?" she echoed. He felt unnaturally warm beneath his shirt. It wasn't unusual—it was actually the new normal—but it was still slightly unnerving when he ran at a temperature far higher than where a normal human body could survive.

"We should go out tonight," he said after a beat. It was technically an answer to her question.

The darkness in the depths of Jemma's mind thrummed. "Yes, that sounds…necessary." She fisted her hand against his chest before taking it back and retreating over to her lab to clean up. There was hardly a mess, but it kept her hands busy while Fitz finished putting the food away.

Her hands shook whenever she was still for a single moment, so she continued to pick things up and place them down, move things a fraction of a centimeter to the left or right. She floated to the coffee table in front of the couch and picked up the few pieces of loose trash. She was on her hands and knees, reaching under the couch for an escaped sock when Fitz called out to her.

She grimaced at the cobwebs attached to her arm as she stood up. "All set?" she asked.

"Food's away," Fitz said, meeting her in front of the couch.

Jemma held up the very dirty sock. "Lost this last week, didn't we?"

He frowned. "Is that really important right now?"

"It could be." She sighed and lifted her non-dirty hand to her forehead. "Imagine it Fitz…a normal life, where dirty laundry and grocery trips are a normality that doesn't involve us living under the grid. I miss being able to just walk outside without worrying a security camera is going to find me. I miss our friends. Don't you?"

"You know I do." He stepped closer and tilted her head up with a finger under her chin. "Once we figure out how to fully control our new abilities…we  _will_  go back to SHIELD, Jemma. I promise that we won't be on the run forever."

Tears glistened in her eyes. "It's been over a year already, Fitz." If being Inhuman was in their DNA, shouldn't it come more natural?

He shook his head and pulled her close for a hug, not caring about her cobwebby arm. He squeezed her tightly and she closed her eyes, her body soaking up his warmth, her senses alight with having him close. It had always been that way, without her even realizing it, but now it was amplified ten-fold. She clung to him and they stayed there in their dim, ramshackle apartment in Chicago for a long time before Jemma shifted and looked up at him.

"We should go," she said softly, the dark of night having settled over the city already.

Fitz gave her one last squeeze, her skin cool and welcoming under his hands, and stepped back. "I'll get the suits," he said, already heading toward their room. "You should eat something!" He disappeared inside the dark room and felt around for the light. Normally, he would let out just enough light to see, but he was so charged up he was sure to lose control and lose it all, leaving Jemma without him to dampen her cravings and he wouldn't do that to her. Never again.

The room was somewhat tidy, but a bit messier than usual. He'd been gone just a few hours later in the day and with Jemma on the edge, she tended to make messes just so she could clean them up later. He walked over to the closet and pushed aside the paper-thin door that always stuck and grabbed the two black boxes sitting on the floor. They were snagged from SHIELD before they left, and had been invaluable at keeping their specially made suits in top shape with near-constant use. Fitz could definitely fix them up if they started to falter, but it wasn't easy to gather the materials needed without SHIELD backing him.

Holding the boxes by the handles, he walked into the open space between the bedroom and the living room that served as Jemma's lab and their own superhero lair. Well, he called it that—to himself, never to Jemma, she would never allow it.

He placed the boxes on the table and glanced up to see Jemma finishing off a piece of toast with jam and wiping her hands on her jeans. She sidled up to him and kissed him chastely, lips sweet with sugar and preserves.

She smiled up at him. "I ate something. Happy?"

"Enough," Fitz said with a small smile of his own. He tore his gaze from her and popped open the boxes. Inside laid two suits perfectly formed to both of their frames. Like Skye's gauntlets to help with her quaking, Jemma and Fitz had come up with suits to help them contain their powers just before they left SHIELD. They weren't ideal, since they didn't know exactly how to control their powers back then, but they were better than going out in civilian clothes. At least these gave them a bit of protection.

They quickly stripped and got into their form fitting suits. Jemma's was black that made it easier to teleport through what the two of them had coined the Darkforce. Fitz's was a mixture of grey and white to better attract and reflect light. After zipping up the suits, Jemma pulled up the heavy hood on hers to hide her face, the shadows already swirling around her temples as if they had minds of their own. Fitz didn't have anything to obscure his face, but as soon as he started releasing his power, it obscured any cameras from reading his face.

"Ready?" Fitz asked. They learned a long time ago that they didn't need to hack any security feeds or criminal records to find the people they were looking for; Jemma did that for them.

Jemma reached out a hand and he held it, standing close. The tiniest radiant glow washed over him, coming  _from_  him. Jemma closed her eyes and listened to the darkness, its hunger telling her just where to go. This was the easiest part of her powers: just  _melting_  into that space that was nothing but darkness and cold and quiet. Unlike anyone else who touched these shadows she emitted, Fitz wasn't affected.

They were two sides of the same coin; her powers couldn't hurt him and his only helped her.

The transport wasn't exact and it took a few steps to bring them where they needed to go.

They ended up near the docks, the cool breeze off the water hitting them first. Fitz glowed just a bit, a crescent shape of pure light curving around his right eye. It was quiet, with few workers and even less security.

With only the bottom half of her face visible, Jemma turned to Fitz, the hunger inside of her rumbling, gnawing, clawing its way out. The faint light from him made the darkness grow agitated. There was one way to fix that.

Without the need for any words, they fell into each other's arms, dark and light, lips finding lips, hands settling in familiar places. Hidden between stacks of cargo haulers, the expulsion of pure Lightforce was barely a flicker to anyone paying attention. Fitz let loose all of the absorbed light from the past few days, and Jemma's shadows greedily ate it up, stopping what would have been a blinding light show otherwise.

Fitz's skin cooled marginally and the light faded as fast as it came, leaving just the crescent on his face gleaming like a star. Jemma sighed against his lips and they parted, their Inhuman forces sated.

"Let's go catch some bad guys, shall we?" Jemma said in a tone similar to one suggesting a picnic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The old ruins rumbled around them and Jemma and Fitz raced toward the room with Skye. Everything happened so quickly. There was a small explosion and the three of them were rooted to the spot. Literally.

"Fitz!" Jemma yelled as the rock formation started to move up her legs. She reached for him.

It happened too fast for anything else to be said. Fitz's face was quickly covered, cutting off her name ringing out of his lungs.

Time didn't exist and then suddenly there was light and explosions and they crumpled to the ground amid piles of rock.

Jemma coughed, the dust clogging her throat. Fitz dragged himself toward her and wouldn't calm down until he took his face in his hands and heard her whisper out his name.

Hours later, when they were back at the lab, all of them were put into pods. Skye, Jemma, Fitz. No one knew what was going on, what happened to them, or how it changed them. Jemma and Bobbi, through a pane of glass, put their heads together and got to the bottom of it. At least, genetically.

It was odd for all of them. They were once one thing and now they were another thing that they didn't understand and couldn't instinctively control. The only saving grace was that, whatever it was, had healed Fitz's brain functions. He no longer searched for words only to never be able to find them, and his time in the pod only made him sharper. Once they were all let out, Fitz, having been sitting under lights for three days, exploded in a wave of pure light—later coined as Lightforce by both him and Simmons—and it was one of these particularly dagger-like bits of light that flew and sunk into Jemma's abdomen, causing her no harm.

One coin, two sides.

It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that as inseparable as the two had been for the past few years, the powers unlocked within them reflected that closeness. It would be impossible for the two of them to live without the other.

Things went relatively smoothly from there on out. Jemma experimented with the Darkforce teleports; Fitz learned how to create semi-solid light daggers but was rubbish at making them hit a target. They often hit Simmons, though they did her no damage. The two of them helped Skye with her gauntlets when her powers started to backfire and fracture the bones in her body.

They waited for their own powers to reveal what the catch was.

It was worse than expected.

Jemma awoke one night, a little more than two weeks after the Terragenesis, a hunger and  _need_  so strong that she stumbled out of bed and dry heaved into the toilet. It felt like something was eating her from the inside. With a single thought in mind, she kept herself up on her feet by holding onto the wall and pulling herself along to a nearby door. She knocked and knocked with no reply. With more force of will than she knew she had, she stepped through a Darkforce teleport to the other side of the door.

Fitz was holding himself together on the floor, his skin cracking, showing light from below,  _within_ , blazing and hot like the sun.

"Jemma," he said weakly as she crawled toward him.

"Fitz," she gasped out. The hunger inside both recoiled and salivated at the light and she dragged herself across the floor.

He reached out, nearly blinding her with the light, but it passed through her harmlessly and the hunger rippled. She slid her fingers between his and gasped at the searing heat. Without thinking, without words, she slid her other hand through his hair and kissed him, softly and tentatively.

They'd never talked about what he said in the pod at the bottom of the ocean. There hadn't been time.

Her hunger and his need of release spoke for them. The kiss grew stronger, harder, longer, calming them both by the time his light was depleted and her hunger no longer felt like a force ready to tear her part from the inside.

Mere minutes later, as they lay there, sweaty from the heat he gave off, and confused as to what was happening, Jemma ran her fingertips along the skin on his arm that had been cracking as if made of concrete. It was healed now, perfectly smooth and without scars.

Their relationship stumbled along quickly after that. They were never far from each other's sides. Fitz fed her aching hunger; Jemma soothed the illumination that threatened to take his life. Things went fine for another couple weeks until Fitz was taken away.

It wasn't malicious, but it ended poorly. With Fitz on a mission, Jemma was alone with her shadows and her darkness. With no Fitz to feed the malicious force, she was overcome. She wasn't herself as she followed where the shadows took her. She felt  _good_  when she put her small, powerful hand around the man's throat and her shadows licked his body, draining him of his life.

The policeman who found her killing the man shot at her but she moved quickly, the bullet bursting through the dead man's abdomen and splattering with blood before disappearing in her shadows, never to be seen again.

The body fell with a thump and she teleported away before the policeman saw her face.

Fitz found her immediately when he came back hours later. She was in his room, covered in blood. He said nothing, but he washed her face and her hands and helped her into the shower, where she cried under the stream of heat, comforted by Fitz standing just out of reach.

She was a liability to SHIELD. She  _killed_  an as-yet-innocent man. She had done it willingly.

It was not a happy break. It was more like tearing off a limb. There were no proper goodbyes. There were punishments and eyes filled with sorrow and Fitz and Jemma—he would never, could never leave her again, lest the shadows take over—left.

They'd been under the radar and on the run from SHIELD ever since.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The overly-greased, overly-blinged out drug dealer selling corrupt K9—one of the newer street drugs that was as untested as all the others—had no idea what hit him. Fitz's daggers had, knocking him back away from the unsuspecting rich kids, who scattered when they saw a man made of light and a woman made of shadows suddenly appear and take down the man they were buying from.

Fitz's dagger sunk into the man's arm and slowly,  _slowly_  began to drain his life away. Just enough make him sink to his knees.

Jemma's shadows leaked out from around her and lapped at his feet like ocean ebbs and flows, conjuring up nightmares of what his life would be if he kept dealing drugs on the streets.

They brought him to the brink of death but he would recover. Jemma grabbed at Fitz's daggers and they absorbed into her hand, a pleasant snack for the darkness.

Fitz notified the police and they waited in the shadows of the nearest cargo hauler until they arrived to leave.

They  _needed_  this exertion to keep themselves alive. They had been turned into predators when their Inhuman genes were unlocked, but they were scientists first and foremost. They were about protecting lives, not taking them. They only took lives with absolutely necessary, and it had only happened twice in the past year after Jemma's initial blunder.

They were trying to redeem themselves and learn about their powers as much as possible before they could even think about returning to SHIELD in hopes of being taken in as agents and not fugitives.

With hands held, they moved through the Darkforce until they got to one of Jemma's favorite spots: the very top of the Sears Tower. The entire city twinkled below them. They could do this all night, every night, but they didn't. They had cover lives to live. They had to  _try_  to spend time apart every now and then; like they had done today.

Fitz hugged Jemma from behind, their hands overlapping across her abdomen, the air threatening to rip them off of the roof. Jemma smiled into the night and settled back against his chest.

Somehow, they would find a new normal. Jemma would be able to get her hands on the latest tech at SHIELD, and go back to helping lives directly. Fitz could go back to stretching his mind in ways he thought he'd lost forever.

Somehow, together, they would make it through.

**Author's Note:**

> If you didn't guess, I based Fitzsimmons's powers off of Cloak & Dagger from the comics with a little bit of leeway. If you want me to write some more of them in this world, let me know! I may be inspired to add a few chapters ;)


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